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The Court's latest Obamacare ruling, in King v. Burwell, upheld the federal subsidies that make health insurance affordable for some policyholders. The subsidies were a necessary complement to the act's individual mandate to purchase insurance; without some kind of assistance, many Americans would have been unable to comply. More than 7 million people — including more than 200,000 Michiganders — claim the credits, and would lose coverage without them.

The crux of the argument against the subsidies hinged on four words in the act, which seemed to imply that only policyholders who purchase insurance via state exchanges — not on the federal exchange, which offered insurance products to residents of states who declined to set up local exchanges — were eligible for the subsidies.

It was an overly literal but nonsensical interpretation rejected by the lawmakers who wrote the law.

The high court went further, affirming that any law must be read in its entire context and cannot be interpreted by courts using a gotcha game intended to thwart the will of the legislative branch.

It's worth noting, also, just how embarrassing Republican foot-stomping over health reform has been. It's not every day you see a party that practically invented and once embraced an idea — the health insurance mandate at the center of the ACA — expend so much energy vilifying it because a president of the other party proposed it.

This was a remarkable low for political discourse, and the crowning moment of the over-personalization of policy-making in Washington.

What next? Stop the challenges.

The law's key provisions — the individual mandate and the subsidies — have been upheld by the courts. The prospect of repeal is slight. With each passing year, the program brings more Americans under the aegis of the health care system.

That's not to say debate over alterations to the law should end here. To the contrary, perhaps now a real discussion about how the law works, and how it might be improved, can unfold in the halls of Congress.

Are there ways to enhance its cost-saving measures? Should we look more carefully at tort reform as a piece of overall health reform? Can we stiffen penalties for skipping out on health insurance to make them more of a deterrent to scofflaws? Should health plans be able to compete across state lines?

These are all reasonable lines of inquiry that could yield significant, substantive improvements in the law.

If congressional Republicans could stop the quixotic sorties against the law, and work within it to improve it, everyone would be better served.

And yet even as the Court's ruling was released, some Republicans were looking head to 2016: With Congress impotent and the Court's support assured, the next big chance for Affordable Care Act opponents is to take the presidency.

It's a bizarre, zero-sum game that seems to pay no heed to the lives of ordinary Americans. It's past time to move on, and to deal with health reform as a fait accompli that should be improved, rather than trashed.